Sunday, December 13, 2015

Pragmatic rape reduction proposals are not always victim blaming

A common
feminist refrain is that any attempt to bring the actions of a rape victim into
the discussion about his or her rape is “victim blaming”, because nobody is to
blame for rape except the rapist. That last bit is certainly true, and in most
cases, I agree that suggestions that women alter their behavior to avoid being
raped are unhelpful and sexist. In the face of massive misogynistic pushback
against rape victims for so long, it’s easy to understand why the term has
become an instinctual response to shifting the topic away from why men rape.

But in
recent years, allegations of victim blaming have expanded to encompass
genuinely feminist, good faith attempts to creatively reduce the incidence of
rape, in ways that are counterproductive to the feminist message and
objectives. There’s
an illogical a line of thought in the feminist community positing that because
only rapists are to blame for rape, proposals to address rape which involve anything other than culture change (aka,
an increased societal willingness to hold rapists personally accountable) are
at best merely a distraction, and at worst a veiled form of victim blaming.

For example, the
people who created that nail-polish that changes color in the presence of
roofies were criticized for placing the onus on the victim, not the
perpetrator, to prevent her own rape. And recently, I saw a proposal to
decrease the drinking age to 18 criticized by a prominent member of the Hopkins
Feminists group in the same vein: since alcohol does not cause rape, addressing
its role in campus nightlife was said to divert blame from the culprits
themselves, and so deemed “not the right kind of change.”

I
wholeheartedly agree that only rapists can be faulted for rape, in the same way
only murderers can be faulted for murder and only robbers for robbery. But when
we consider how to reduce the rate of murder or theft in a given city, we do
not limit the scope of our conversation to moral culpability; we very often
look at broader social conditions that may influence those rates indirectly,
like poverty or access to weapons. Are policies which attempt to lessen crime
by influencing those external variables also “not advocating for the right kind
of policy change”? Or does it make sense, in most other contexts, to address
violent crime on a pragmatic level as well as a moral one?

Surely many on the feminist left advocate for stronger gun control laws as a
means to reduce gun violence. Such proposals are not designed to address
whatever root cultural issues prompt some people to go on murderous rampages;
rather, they are designed to bring about the desired social outcome indirectly,
by denying the people who want to kill the means to execute their plan. In this
context, liberal reformers seem to agree that fighting purely cultural battles in
an attempt to dissuade evildoers from doing evil is an insufficient response to
an epidemic of violence.

Gun control
places the onus for change not on the would-be perpetrator, but on the peaceful
remainder of society. Yet nobody interprets this as denying that crazed mass
shooters retain full moral responsibility for their actions, and nor should
they. Why are pragmatic proposals to address college rape any different?

In both
cases, indirect causation is not the same as culpability. To use another
analogy, the United States is not to “blame” for 9/11. Only the men who plotted
to drive planes into buildings full of innocent people can be held morally
responsible. But culpable or not, it would be silly to pretend that US foreign
policy played no role whatsoever in bringing about those events – bin Laden
himself repeatedly said and wrote that our perceived injustices in his region
of the world were his primary motivation for the attacks. When we brainstorm
ways to minimize terror attacks in the future, it does not suffice to point out
that terrorists and rapists are evil people. Forging national security strategy
involves figuring out how to prevent terrorists from operating in a far more
immediate way than encouraging Middle Eastern culture change, even if that’s
also a worthwhile long-term project we should dive into simultaneously.

Rape is little different. Nobody and nothing is to “blame” for rape in a moral
sense except rapists. Eliminating ineffective policies that accidentally make
rape easier to commit does not implicitly condone rapists or deny they are the
ultimate source of the problem. What it does is erect structural barriers that
make it tougher for those abhorrent, evil, very bad no good rapists to get away
with the crime.